MudMan
@MudMan@fedia.io
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 1 week ago:
Yeah, but nobody would argue that GameStop was dying in 2002, which is seven years into GameFAQs existing and very much the heyday of Prima and other dedicated print guide writers. Seriously, it just doesn't line up. GameFAQs and print guides were servicing the same need.
Again, I'm not saying it didn't have an impact. I'm saying if Prima guides existed as standalone publications in dedicated gaming stores it's partly because GameFAQs had killed monthly print magazines as a viable way to acquire strategy guides for games, so you instead had dedicated guide publishers working directly with devs and game publishers to have print guides ready to go at day one, sometimes shipping directly bundled with the game.
And then you had an army of crowdsourcer guide writers online that were catching up to those print products almost immediately but offering something very different (namely a searchable text-only lightweight doc different from the high quality art-heavy print guides).
Those were both an alternative to how this worked in the 90s, which was by print magazines with no online competition deciding which game to feature with a map, guide or tricks and every now and then publishing a garbage compilation on toilet paper pulp they could bundle with a mag. I still have some of those crappy early guides. GameFAQs and collectible print guides are both counters to that filling two solutions to the equation and they both share a similar curve in time, from the Internet getting big and killing mag cheats to the enshittified Internet replacing text guides with video walkthroughs and paid editorial digital guides made in bulk.
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 1 week ago:
Well, I'd argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn't have purchased GameFAQs. At the very least it served to bring people over to their media ecosystem, and I wanna say they did serve ads and affiliate links on the site proper (but adblocker is also old, so it's hard to tell).
Video contributed, for sure. This is a process of many years, the whole thing was evolving at once. But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn't fit the timeline at all. It's off by 5-10 years, at least. Guides weren't residual in the 00s when GameFAQs was at its peak and being bought as a company, they were doing alright. It'd take 10 years longer for them to struggle and 15 for them to disappear. You're two console gens off there. That's a lot. If guide makers like Prima were pivoting to collectible high end books out of desperation you'd expect that process to have failed faster than that.
Instead they failed at the same time GameFAQs started to struggle and get superseded, so I'm more inclined to read that as them both being part of the same thing and the whole thing struggling together as we move towards video on media and digital on game publishing. That fits the timeline better, I think.
In any case, it was what it was, and it's more enshittified now. I've been looking up a couple details on Blake Manor (which is good but buggy and flaky in pieces, so you may need some help even if you don't want to spoil yourself) and all you get is Steam forums and a couple of hard to navigate pages. The print guide/GameFAQs era was harder to search but more convenient, for sure.
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 1 week ago:
It's not a "even if some existed" thing, Prima operated until 2018. I personally remember preorder bundles with Prima guides for 360 era games and beyond. They published incredibly elaborate collector's hardbook guides (that honestly doubled as artbooks) for stuff like Twilight Princess and Halo 3, all the way to the PS4 gen.
Even granting that "booming" is probably a bit hyperbolic, if GameFAQs being free in 1995 was going to kill them, bleeding out would probably not have taken 23 years. The death of retail, print and physical games probably hurt print guides way more than GameFAQs ever did. You didn't buy those because you were in a hurry to solve a puzzle or look up a special move. They were collectibles and art books first and foremost.
FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn't as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think. At least that's what IGN was doing, and they're the ones that went hard on that front first. Also for the record, that probably had something to do with IGN and GameFAQs being affiliated for a while. GameFAQs was bought off by CNET in '03, it was definitely part of the big online gaming press ecosystem. I can see how IGN thought they could do better.
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 1 week ago:
I don't know that the timeline works out there. GameFAQs is, as this post reminds us, pretty old. Even assuming that it didn't break out until the very late 90s or early 00s as THE destination for guides, there was certainly a booming editoral market for highly produced guides all the way into the Xbox 360 era.
I'd say it was responsible for the press not focusing on guides as much and instead refocusing on news and reviews. And then news and reviews died out and the press that was left refocused on guides again because by that point the text-only crowdsourced output of GameFAQs was less interesting than the more fully produced, visually-driven guides in professional outlets. And now... well, who knows, it's a mess now. Mostly Reddit, I suppose?
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 1 week ago:
I mean... MK1 predates it by what? 3-4 years? Which in 90s tech time is an eternity.
MK fatality guides were mostly in print. Magazines were all over that type of stuff at the time. But it wouldn't have been strange to get a familiarly formatted ASCII guide for them with, say, your pirated floppies of the DOS or Amiga versions.
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 1 week ago:
Hm... I'm a bit mixed on that, because GameFAQs became relevant a bit later than that, but at the same time that type of format for ASCII game guides predates GameFAQs being the main place you went to get them, so... it evens out?
I probably didn't start going to GameFAQs for this stuff until like 2000, but I certainly was using text guides for games in the 90s.
- Comment on The State of Switch Emulation right now is objectively hilarious 3 weeks ago:
Eden/Azahar seem to be the current meta replacement for the newer Nintendo platforms. I wonder how much of that is a crowdfunded assessment of quality and how much is a result of modern emu communities being driven by preinstalled bundles in launchers, handhelds and install scripts (think ES-DE standards or Retrodeck/Emudeck defaults).
Either way, hey, they work fine, so... yay?
- Comment on OLAY! 1 month ago:
I did not remember that and I still remember "Los pollos hermanos", so that tells you how weird that one is.
Also, this dogpile works better if you understand what you're reading. The comedic effect bit was about the title of the thread, not about my own typo. Now you made it weird by trying to outpedant a pedant but not having the reading comprehension to pedant properly.
- Comment on OLAY! 1 month ago:
Goddamn it.
NOW it's fixed.
- Comment on OLAY! 1 month ago:
I mean... no, mine's a typo (fixed now, thanks for the poke), the other one is a deliberate spelling for comedic effect that accidentally uncovers an endless loop of abject multilingual terror.
This is a Gus Frink meme type of situation.
He also, incidentally, couldn't speak Spanish for shit. That whole show was a nightmare. "Los Pollos Hermanos" as a phrase haunts me. I genuinely, not joking about this, sometimes find myself thinking about it at random times after all this time.
- Comment on OLAY! 1 month ago:
You'd be surprised. Spanish countries often dub movies, particularly back then.
But if you want to know what it felt like later in life I can help.
- Comment on OLAY! 1 month ago:
...
The ouroboros of bad pronutiation the headline implies is throwing me for a massive loop.
I mean, you carry on with your American politics things, I just saw this on my feed and had an existential crisis.
- Comment on soda 1 month ago:
I mean, I appreciate the gumption but, honestly? This mentality is probably why Americans can't have decent public services.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 1 month ago:
I mean, convenience is a factor.
And while Steam doesn't typically sign exclusive stuff they are known to use store positioning as a bargaining chip for preferential treatment. You'd think Konami would be above needing that, but who knows.
Anyway, good game, whatever the reason for the delay. Someone who is on the fence about getting it on Steam go get it on GOG instead to make up for them tricking me.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 1 month ago:
It's come and gone a couple times. There was a period where a bunch of big games did simultaneous launches, then a big period of drought where a few large publishers withdrew entirely from new releases and recently a few isolated AA and AAA releases started popping back up. I wonder if it's driven by how much effort they can put into outreach or something like that.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 1 month ago:
Yeah, it sucks for Silent Hill especially because a) it's super expensive, at 80 bucks on PC, and b) I was on the fence about getting it at launch and only jumped in a few days ago. I'm just out of the refund window and... hey, I like it so far, but I don't like it 160 bucks' worth.
Whoever is screwing with GOG screwed them out of my purchase and I'm starting to think that not buying anything on Steam at all if I can help it may be the way to go.
- Comment on Do boycotts work? 1 month ago:
Boycotts, yes.
"I was on the fence about buying this and I want to sound engaged on the Internet, may still get it later" voting-with-your-wallet nonsense? No.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 1 month ago:
Alright, this is great, but also people need to start confirming GOG drops before the Steam launch. I check for GOG launches whenever I buy a game, but just this month there's been a couple of big games that got stealth GOG launches just after their Steam release and it's been extremely frustrating. I don't know if it's a publisher thing to work around pirates waiting for DRM free versions or Steam being dicks about it, but it's infuriating.
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 1 month ago:
It's a "me" problem in that "I" think the indies vs AAA lines are increasingly inconsistent and nonsensical. "I" also find the concept of "pirating against" to be extremely disingenuous, which is why there is a whole post explaining that after the line you quoted.
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 1 month ago:
The hell does "piracy against big companies" even mean?
Man, pirate what you can't afford if you must, just... you know, be honest about it. I'm always annoyed by people doing the thing they wanted to do anyway and presenting it as activism. That's not how that works.
For the record, while I think there's plenty to be critical about in modern gaming, "DLC", "game has a launcher" and "game is ported from other platforms" are not that. "A game I played on the PS3 was too expensive when I wanted to rebuy it" is somebody giving you bad value up front, not some ideological stance you're taking. For the record, I also didn't buy it because I also didn't think their launch price was right. In fairness, it has since been on sale for 30 bucks multiple times, which is a lot more reasonable.
And again, I'm not saying don't pirate it. Do what you want. Just don't be weird about it.
- Comment on Do you think The Boys is an accurate representation if real people had superpowers? 1 month ago:
No, no, Jeff Ennis worked as an actual superhero briefly in the 1970s you're thinking of John Ennis, who created The Boys as a musical in the 90s, but he was mad about his working conditions.
- Comment on Do you think The Boys is an accurate representation if real people had superpowers? 1 month ago:
No, it's much more interesting than that.
It's an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all and being a bit of a petty bitch with a bit of a dudebro sense of humor that, frankly, we all overrated at the time because when you were a teenager in the 90s you thought Preacher was hilarious and it got to his head a bit.
And then it's an accurate representation of Eric Kripke who was very much the right age to have gone through that, taking the material and going "well, that Trump guy sure was a thing, huh?" and "aren't you kind of over all those MCU movies, also?" because superheroes in film were at the same point in 2019 than they were on comic books in 2006.
Don't be the teenager we all were in the 90s and assume that "edgy and mean and over the top" is the same as "smart and realistic". It's not.
I'll say that the show is at least less callous than the original material and it's at least trying to be political, which makes it slightly more plausible and internally consistent than Ennis' HR complaint of a comic book. Hollywood has a history of taking this edgelord crap (see also: every single Mark Millar adaptation) and making it palatable by applying the same mainstreaming and dumbing down that kills every Alan Moore adaptation. Turns out if the original material isn't that smart to begin with that's actually a good thing to do.
- Comment on I'm gonna die on this hill or die trying 1 month ago:
Well that went places.
- Comment on I'm gonna die on this hill or die trying 1 month ago:
This is a weird pattern in that presumably mass abandonment of the em dashes due to the memes around it looking like AI content would quickly lead to newer LLMs based on newer data sets also abandoning em dashes when it tries to seem modern and hip and just punt the ball down the road to the next set of AI markers. I assume as long as book and press editors keep stikcing to their guns that would go pretty slow, but it'd eventually get there. And that's assuming AI companies don't add instructions about this to their system prompts at any point. It's just going to be an endless arms race.
Which is expected. I'm on record very early on saying that "not looking like AI art" was going to be a quality marker for art and the metagame will be to keep chasing that moving target around for the foreseeable future and I'm here to brag about it.
- Comment on Amid EA's unpopular $55 billion buyout, Baldur's Gate 3 director takes time "to remind people that making games faster and cheaper while charging more has never worked before" 1 month ago:
I mean, all due respect, to the guy, but this doesn't go down until 2027. At least give them a minute to get in the position where they could feasibly fuck up before you berate them for it.
If you look at the Internet they are apparently definitely dismantling the company to sell the pieces but also definitely continuing to make what they make but with MAGA politics but also as a muslim theocracy and trimming down and speeding up but also doubling down on live service at the same time somehow.
And man, one or multiple of those may happen, but almost certainly not all of them and none have happened yet. Given how much of a public-ass public company chasing short term gains they've been historically I can't help but think there's a fair amount of projection going on.
Here's my stance: I have no idea what this means and I have no idea what they're going to do. This is all weird and I have zero frame of reference for how the new owners are going to gel with that organization or what their new objectives are going to be when compared to the old "make more money this quarter than last quarter" thing.
- Comment on Do you recognize this guy playing video games? 1 month ago:
80s micros consistently look better than any modern computer OR modern keyboard. I'll fight you on this and I'll win.
- Comment on Confirmed - Electronic Arts (EA) sold off to investors including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund 1 month ago:
Well, yeah, but those principles don't typically relate to videogame companies nor to purchase habits regarding 30 year old videogames.
Voting with your wallet is ultracapitalist, self-serving non-activism people deploy performatively to make themselves feel better about stuff they don't care that much about, not "principles". No offense.
- Comment on What are your must-block tags on social media? 1 month ago:
In social media? Not much.
Here I block any and all threads and communities that focus on US news. Specifically stuff that just has a generic name ("News") but is 100% US-focused content.
Night and day improvement, frankly.
- Comment on Confirmed - Electronic Arts (EA) sold off to investors including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund 1 month ago:
"Principles"? Man, is that self-indulgent.
- Comment on Confirmed - Electronic Arts (EA) sold off to investors including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund 1 month ago:
It's been EA since a different millenium. I think it's time to get over it.
FWIW, the remake itself was made by an external studio including members of the original team and they apparently collaborated closely with some sort of consulting group of modders and preservation-focused community people.